Marcel Duchamp was a famous expatriate, a wanderer, living and working in Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires and escaping from them in turn. But exile, argues T. J. Demos in this innovative reading, is more than a fact in Duchamp's biography. Exile--in the artist's own words, a "spirit of expatriation"--infuses Duchamp's entire artistic practice. Indeed a profound sense of dislocation--from geographical situation, national identity, and cultural conventions--deeply informs the mobile objects and disjunctive spaces of Duchamp's readymades and experimental exhibition installations. Duchamp's readymade constructions, his installations for surrealist exhibitions in Paris and New York, and his "portable museum" (the suggestively named La bo & i te-en-valise), Demos writes, all manifest, define, and exploit the terms of exile in multiple ways. Created while the artist was living variously in New York, Buenos Aires, and occupied France, during the global catastrophes of war and fascism, these works express the anguish of displacement and celebrate the freedom of geopolitical homelessness. The "portable museum," a suitcase containing miniature reproductions of Duchamp's work, for example, represented a complex meditation--both critical and joyful--on modern art's tendency toward itinerancy, whereas Duchamp's 1942 installation design entangling a New York gallery in a mile of string announced the dislocated status that many exiled surrealists wished to forget. Demos connects Duchamp's condition of exile to forms of displacement within photographic practice and modern museum exhibitions, theorized extensively at the time by Walter Benjamin, Andr & e ́ Malraux, and Frederick Kiesler. He claims that in the period of fascism's elevation of the home as the site of national imagination, Duchamp's antinational identity became a form of resistance, just as his artistic practice represented a complex response to capitalism's increasing institutionalization and marketing of art. Duchamp's exile, writes Demos, defines a new ethics of independent life in the modern age of nationalism and advanced capitalism, offering a precursor to our own globalized world of nomadic subjects and dispersed experience.

While much has been written on Marcel Duchamp - one of the twentieth century's most beguiling artists - the subject of his flirtation with architecture seems to have been largely overlooked. Yet, in the carefully arranged plans and sections organising the blueprint of desire in the Large Glass, his numerous pieces replicating architectural fragments, and his involvement in designing exhibitions, Duchamp's fascination with architectural design is clearly evident. As his unconventional architectural influences - Niceron, Lequeu and Kiesler - and diverse legacy - Tschumi, OMA, Webb, Diller + Scofidio and Nicholson - indicate, Duchamp was not as much interested in 'built' architecture as he was in the architecture of desire, re-constructing the imagination through drawing and testing the boundaries between reality and its aesthetic and philosophical possibilities. Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire examines the link between architectural thinking and Duchamp's work. By employing design, drawing and making - the tools of the architect - Haralambidou performs an architectural analysis of Duchamp’s final enigmatic work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas... demonstrating an innovative research methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. Through three main themes - allegory, visuality and desire - the book defines and theorises an alternative drawing practice positioned between art and architecture that predates and includes Duchamp.

Marcel Duchamp is today considered one of the most significant 20th century artists worldwide. His far-reaching influence is visible within a variety of areas of creative production and critical inquiry, extending far beyond the world of art. Duchamp Accelerated: Contemporary Perspectives examines Duchamp and his reception through a series of essays that explore the ongoing impacts of his life, ideas and practice on innumerable fields of research, practice and study. Contributors include art historians, curators, artists and writers who offer histories and approaches that actively challenge dominant narratives on Duchamp, discussing his influences from a multitude of different disciplinary and cultural perspectives. Written in the specific context of the 21st century, this volume situates the artist firmly in a global context and highlights the numerous influences – from theories of perception and the writings of Georges Bataille, to travels in Argentina – that shaped his ideas and art. This volume pushes current understandings of Duchamp beyond existing limits by accelerating the histories, encounters, dialogues and interpretations of his practice, with a focus on contemporary perspectives. The 'accelerated' Duchamp that emerges from this analysis is one who not only speeds up notions of art in relation to cultural and political histories, but one whose practice is actively informing future developments in the worlds of art and material culture today.

An unprecedented survey of artists in exile from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to Asian, Latin American, African American, and female artists This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of exiled artists from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to individuals who have often been relegated to the margins of publications on exile in art history. The artworks featured here, including photography, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, present an expanded view of the conditions of exile--forced or voluntary--as an agent for both trauma and ingenuity. The introduction outlines the history and perception of exile in art over the past 200 years, and the book's four sections explore its aesthetic impact through the themes of home and mobility, nostalgia, transfer and adjustment, and identity. Essays and catalogue entries in each section showcase diverse artists, including not only European ones--like Jacques-Louis David, Paul Gauguin, George Grosz, and Kurt Schwitters--but also female, African American, East Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Harold Cousins, Mona Hatoum, Lotte Jacobi, An-My Lê, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Abelardo Morell, Mu Xin, and Shirin Neshat.

aka Marcel Duchamp is an anthology of recent essays by leading scholars on Marcel Duchamp, arguably the most influential artist of the twentieth century. With scholarship addressing the full range of Duchamp's career, these papers examine how Duchamp's influence grew and impressed itself upon his contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists. Duchamp provides an illuminating model of the dynamics of play in construction of artistic identity and legacy, which includes both personal volition and contributions made by fellow artists, critics, and historians. This volume is not only important for its contributions to Duchamp studies and the light it sheds on the larger impact of Duchamp's art and career on modern and contemporary art, but also for what it reveals about how the history of art itself is shaped over time by shifting agendas, evolving methodologies, and new discoveries.

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition The original copy: photography of sculpture, 1839 to today, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (August 1-November 1, 2010)"--T.p. verso.

A revised and expanded edition of one of the most original books ever written on the enigmatic artist Marcel Duchamp. Genius, anti-artist, charlatan, guru, impostor? Since he arrived on the scene in 1914, Marcel Duchamp has been called all of these. Almost no other artist of the twentieth century has inspired more passion and controversy, nor exerted a greater influence on art. At the same time, Duchamp continually challenged the very nature of art and strove to redefine it as conceptual rather than as product by questioning why the medium was mostly a "retinal" experience. Always the provocateur, Duchamp never ceased to be engaged, openly or secretly, in activities and works that transformed traditional artmaking. Through his works like Fountain; Bicycle Wheel; L.H.O.O.Q.; and Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Duchamp played with the idea of what art can be, opening new possibilities for future generations. This revised entry in the World of Art series, written by three leading experts on twentieth-century art, and published with support of Duchamp’s widow, is one of the most original books written on this enigmatic artist. Featuring a new chapter and preface, as well as updates throughout from specialist scholars who are active in their fields, this is the definitive introduction to Duchamp. Thoroughly illustrated, this volume combines thirty years of research by the authors and challenges history’s presumptions, misunderstandings, and pieces of misinformation about Marcel Duchamp and his legacy.

German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile. Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.

A controversial masterpiece resurfaces in Budapest. A ballerina's headless corpse is found beneath the boardwalk at Brighton Beach. And New York's Russian mob is about to collide with the equally ruthless art world... Maddy Blume, an ambitious young art buyer for a Manhattan hedge fund, is desperate to track down a priceless painting by Marcel Duchamp, the most influential artist of the twentieth century. The discovery of a woman’s decapitated body thrusts criminal investigator Alan Powell into a search for the same painting, with its enigmatic image of a headless nude. And a Russian thief and assassin known as the Scythian must steal the painting to save his reputation – and his life. The murderous race is on. And in the lead is an insidious secret society intent on reclaiming the painting for reasons of its own – and by any means necessary….

In The Migrant Image T. J. Demos examines the ways contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, the stateless, and the politically dispossessed. He presents a sophisticated analysis of how artists from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East depict the often ignored effects of globalization and the ways their works connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic crisis. Demos investigates the cinematic approaches Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl employ to blur the real and imaginary in their films confronting geopolitical conflicts between North and South. He analyzes how Emily Jacir and Ahlam Shibli use blurs, lacuna, and blind spots in their photographs, performances, and conceptual strategies to directly address the dire circumstances of dislocated Palestinian people. He discusses the disparate interventions of Walid Raad in Lebanon, Ursula Biemann in North Africa, and Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri in the United States, and traces how their works offer images of conflict as much as a conflict of images. Throughout Demos shows the ways these artists creatively propose new possibilities for a politics of equality, social justice, and historical consciousness from within the aesthetic domain.